Don’t look now, but Apple’s getting aggressive on pricing; so aggressive that it might make rivals with much thinner margins break out in a sweat.
Apple Inc.’s biggest surprise at its keynote address on Tuesday was not a new feature, device, or service, but an aggressive pricing strategy that’s a departure for the premium electronics maker.
The iPhone 11 starts at $699, down from the iPhone XR’s $749 price last year. The XR stays in the lineup for $599, a $150 decrease for a phone that’s only a year old. That’s one of the biggest year-over-year reductions in iPhone history. The iPhone 8 from 2017 now costs $449, also down $150, while the Apple Watch Series 3 from the same year saw its price drop to $199 from $279.
The Apple Arcade gaming service is $4.99 a month, roughly half the cost of Apple Music and Apple News+. The $4.99 monthly cost of Apple’s upcoming TV+ video streaming service surprised many analysts and undercuts Netflix Inc., Amazon.com Inc.’s Prime Video, and the Disney+ offering. And when people buy an iPhone and iPad, a Mac or an Apple TV, they get a free year of TV+.
MacDailyNews Take: Apple will have signed up tens of millions of Apple TV+ and Apple Arcade subscribers by this time next year.
Will you subscribe?
— MacDailyNews (@MacDailyNews) September 10, 2019
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Fred Mertz” for the heads up.]